...Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Vincent Connare for the Microsoft Corporation in 1996. It is named after the trebuchet, a medieval siege engine. The name is a response from the puzzle question Vincent Connare heard from within Microsoft headquarters. The question was "can you make a trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away? Mathematically is it possible and how?"...

I don't see the connection. I'd like to check further into the use of the "trebuchet" name for this font.

The Trebuchet typeface family, like Verdana and Georgia, was created for use on the screen. Designed and engineered in 1996 by Microsoft’s Vincent Connare, it has a strong and unmistakable appearance. Borrowing elements from both the geometric and humanist classifications of sans serif type - Connare acknowledges the influence of designs as diverse as Gill Sans, Erbar, Frutiger, Akzidenz Grotesk and the US Highway signing system - Trebuchet infuses any page with energy and personality. Its letterforms, loosely based on sans serif typeface designs of the 1920s and 1930s, carry a large x-height and clean lines designed to promote legibility, even at small sizes...

...One of Connare's intentions when designing Trebuchet was to instill personality into the letterforms, even at small sizes, while retaining clarity and readability. He wanted to create a typeface which was 'significantly distinguishable from Verdana and MS Sans...

I think Connare succeeeded admirably with this font. I'm interested to see that he also designed Comic Sans MS.

Hmmm... this may serve to augment Wikipedia's mysterious correlation of the name of this font with the idea of hurling somebody across the Microsoft corporate campus in a medieval siege engine:

...The typeface name is credited to a puzzle heard at Microsoft, where the question was asked, "could you build a Trebuchet (a form of medieval catapult) to launch a person from the main campus to the consumer campus, and how?" The Trebuchet fonts are intended to be the vehicle that fires your messages across the Internet. "Launch your message with a Trebuchet page"...

I like the look of this font when it's used for the annotation of either vector or raster digital images. Its on-screen clarity seems to be an asset for image headings and captions.

Jeff Hook

Last edited by Jeff hook on Fri May 30, 2008 1:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

Nah, this ain't "work," it's just fun! My comments in this thread were composed right here on the screen. I "did my research" in my browser, limited as it was, and I just pasted portions of it to this thread, so this was a "one-step" contribution. (I'd usually create a local "research" file and I'd usually compose my thread comments there, to gain the benefit of spell-checking, etc. In this case I just "slapped it all down" onto the screen here, as I found it in the browser, with no great investment of time.)

Believe it or not, I'm going out right now to try to cut the grass at 7:50 PM EDST, so I'll not be posting any more comments in the immediate future!

(Trebuchet: What a great font. I've only begun to use it in my many annotated images recently, and I love it, so the word definitely caught my eye.)

I always had far too many fonts "on deck" (>600, I think, before I moved most of them out of the active folder) so I was well aware of the existence of a large "Humanist Font Family." I often saw the name while I scrolled up and down the mile-long font list in my word processor.

I think most of them are German, Austrian, and Swiss, but I haven't even checked my own Google response set.